Monolith Cocktail Blog

THE MONTHLY DIGEST INCLUDES A CLUTCH OF ACCUMULATED NEW MUSIC REVIEWS; THE SOCIAL INTER-GENERATIONAL/ECLECTIC AND ANNIVERSARY ALBUMS CELEBRATING PLAYLIST; AND CHOICE PIECES FROM THE ARCHIVES.

(Photo by Todd Weaver)

___THE NEW___

Ingebrigt Håker Flaten’s (Exit) Knarr ‘Drops’
(Sonic Transmissions) 22^nd August 2025

Growing, developing and expanding the remit from what was meant to be a one-off commission, brought together especially for the Vossajazz Festival, the troupe is now on its third titanic fusion rich studio album proper. Set in motion by Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (who also runs the Sonic Transmissions label, home to the ensemble’s recordings) a number of years back, the (Exit) Knarr now acts as the ‘main creative vehicle’ for the Norwegian bassist going forward it seems.

Settling with a reasonable lineup on this third chapter but inviting in a number of guests on the album’s statement piece, a transformed vision of jazz deity Wayne Shorter’s ‘Deluge’ piece from the revered and influential 1965 album release JuJu, on this outing the sextet takes prompt or inspiration from a more visual source. In the sphere of the Russian maverick abstract visionary and Bauhaus professor Wassily Kandinsky and Swedish mystic and abstract progenitor – some would say the true and first ever abstract artist, beating her peers (Malevich and Mondrian) to pure abstraction by a few good years – Hilma af Klint, a number of graphic scores have been used to foster untethered freedoms and play from a group already in the freeform mode. In one way, addressing perhaps the lack of knowledge, the place in which she should stand, there’s an unsaid elevation of Klint, an early adopter of the very spiritualism, Theosophy, that first led the way for Mondrian and many of his circle to dare to strip away every last visage, reference of the world for abstraction. Arguably Klint can be said to preceded Kandinsky and the others to this goal. And her work is filled with the iconic circular shapes, the colurs that would go on to inspire Sonia Delaunay and many others.

As a visual methodology, these scores go some way to painting a reification of a partly live studio performance and the ‘tweaked’ effected and transmogrified aftermaths.

Bringing together Amalie Dahl on alto, Karl Hjalmar Nyberg on tenor and electronics, Marta Warelis on piano and also on electronics, Jonathan F. Horne on guitar, Olaf Olsen on drums and of course IHF on what sounds like both electric and double bass, the album divides two longer form performances with a couple of shorter pieces. Speaking the experimental language of Anthony Braxton with garbled, hysterical and squeezed abandon, and inspired by the equally freeform pioneering Mats Gustafasson and his No Ensemble, the ensemble open with an already mentioned version of Shorter’s ‘Deluge’; taking the original’s more controlled bluesy swing style of simmering and serenaded and crooned sax for a tumultuous ride on the open seas of both discord and crested freefalls. It starts with twisted guitar wire grabbing and neck sliding and incipient tethered drums but soon develops into a recognisable, familiar feel before numerous swells and peaks resemble a fusion of the Henry Grimes Trio (cicra ‘Fish Story’ if we’re being specific), Rashied Ali, the Anthony Braxton Quartet, Keith Jarratt and Darius Jones. Wild in places, with the guitar going on to sound like a sci-fi dialect of tabbed beeps and switches, and the horns squeezed until the pips fall out, the action is shared out equally between all participants without losing a single instrument.: and that’s when you consider there’s also the guests, Mette Rasmussen on a second alto and a second drummer, Veslemøy Narvesen added to that untamed tidal wave experiment.

The album title is next. A change of a kind in tempo and thought this shorter composition articulates those droplets in various ways on a performance that sounds more open air than studio recorded. The sound of a dragon fly’s wings in rapid hovered form hangs around in a chamber-esque atmosphere of musing and pondering. Part JAF Trio, part ECM and part classical-minded jazz of a certain vintage, the gentle cascade of drips and drops fall very nicely and mysteriously on this Scandinavian ice float.

A second centrepiece if you like, ‘Kanon’ is dedicated to the renowned Norwegian drummer, composer and free jazz improvisor of note Paal Nilssen-Love. From his parents famous Stavanger jazz club located incubator to the capital and onto wide world recognition, Paal played with such notable company as Mats Gustafasson and Peter Brotzmann’s Chicago Tentet, before going on to set up his own All Ears festival. As an inspiration to a generation of Norwegians, Paal’s influence is huge. And in this mode, at this time, the sextet conjures up a semblance of his artform and free experimentation. But first, it all starts with some speaking panning of a curled up rattling drum roll, the quivers and quavers of the piano and what could be the attempt to match the sound of a buzzing bee. But it all soon develops into a wilder proposition of Masayuki Takayanagi, Eric Dolphy (I’m thinking specifically here of Out To Lunch!), Roscoe Mitchell, Andy Haas, Bill Dixon and Last Exit. It keeps changing; whether that’s in the action, dynamics between players, the tampering down parts that then peak into hysterical cries of squeezed, rasped and the burbled. A surprising passage of play even takes on a Lalo Schifrin vibe nearer the end.

The finale is left down to a performance that’s manipulated (or ‘tweaked’ as it’s written here), stretched out and elongated into a sci-fi hallucination. As if being treated and remodelled in real time, it sounds like the band is being pulled via a prism into the mirror backwards. It reminded me of the We Jazz label and their own retreated, remixed projects over the years. But stands as a more electronically led production that offers up a slightly off-kilter and magically alien version of their sound.

Ingebrigt Håker Flaten’s (Exit) Knarr colour new directions with an extended palette of ideas and sounds; heading towards breaking point before returning back to a recognition of the free form jazz movement that we can recognise. Source it out.

Andy Haas & Brian g Skol ‘The Honeybee Twist’
1^st August 2025

Striking up an online and postal friendship since first writing about the highly experimental saxophonist, trick noise maker and effects manipulator when touring as a band member with Meg Remy’s Plastic Ono Band-esque U.S. Girls a few years before Covid, the former Muffin, NYC side man to the city’s attracted maverick luminaries of the avant-garde and freeform jazz, and prolific collaborator with Toronto’s most explorative and interesting artists, has sent me regular bulletins (and physical copies) of his various projects. Some have been in the solo mode, others with friends, foils and collectives.

Running off just a smattering of those releases (a majority of which have been with the highly obscure Resonantmusic imprint) from the last decade or so, and you have three extraordinary albums with the stringed-instrumentalist Don Fiorino (American Nocturne, Don’t Have Mercy and Accidentals), various appearances on records by Matt ‘Doc’ Dunn’s The Cosmic Range, the warped and discombobulating For The Time, Being solo act, and the avant-garde improvised performative triumvirate of SCRT with regular collaborator David Grollman and Sabrina Salamone.

Andy Haas now partners up with fellow Toronto native Brian g Skol for an unusual duet of saxophone and drums. Although it was recorded back in that city in 2024, the finished concentration and spatial experiment is now seeing the light with an official release via Haas’s own Bandcamp profile. I’m glad it hasn’t disappeared into obscurity, as it is one of the best, most radical but surprisingly rhythmic and pumped, worldly sounding album’s he’s made; much of this is down to the visual artist and percussionist/drummer Skol’s expressive and grasp/ear for international influences of rhythm, from both the Latin and Afro-South American to North Africa and the influence of Jaki Liebezeit.

The Honeybee Twist is a strange union between two instruments seldom pitted against each other; certainly not in this setting, with Haas once more wildly controlling the panning of his serialism style and both atonal and shrilling, bristled circular breathing sax and Skol combining hand drums, various percussive elements and drum kit breaks to provide a beat, a groove or more sporadic passages of the tactile, textures and tumultuous.

From nothing, reifications of the fire thief Prometheus, compounds, a vertical axis used in a 3-D space to show depth and elevation, self-assembly and play of words take some form of shape across an album of mystery, extemporization, and musing.  Whilst stirring up these evocations, these reference points, both players traverse and kick around Arabian landscapes, Jon Hassell’e fourth world, the extremes of Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler, Sonny Simmons, Andrew Cyrille and Evan Parker, and the factory. The opening mythologically entitled ‘The Eagle And Prometheus’, sounds like a sax and drums transmogrification of Battles; leaping straight in with beating drums, splashes of cymbal and that signature circular breathing technique. This is where I believe you can hear an echo of Saw Delight era CAN relocated to Egypt or the Arabian souk: Haas’s sax starts to sound more like a shrilling vibrating mizmar or even a zurna, and Skol’s drums could be mistaken for the daf and riz on occasion.  

Against the near constantly moving, feeling and exploring drums and percussion, Haas’s effected sax goes from blues to freeform jazz, to reflections and colloquy and soliloquy. There’s a harshness and roughness at times to that instrument as it goes through various warbles, buzzes, rasps and drones.

Despite the title of ‘Maybe I’m A Machine’, there is no mistaking that this is a very human interaction between two highly experienced experimental artists circumnavigating any kind of easy label, demarcation. The notes of an abstract nature bristle, vibrate and trill to a near amorphous global rhythm on a most experimentally original collaboration. Please seek it out.  

Maria Elena Silva ‘Wise Men Never Try Vol. II’
1^st August 2025

As promised last month, the second volume in the Wise Men Never Try series from the near evanescent and relaxed but deeply effecting singer and musician Maria Elena Silva.

After previous releases, some of which featured such notable company as Jeff Parker and Marc Ribot, and after stripping back Bob Dylan’s courtly enigmatic dames to their most essential essences with interpretations of both ‘Queen Jane’ and a summoned bell rung ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’, the Chicago homed Maria has turned to readapting, revaluating and transposing various themed songbooks from America’s past. Volume I, reviewed in the July Digest, turned to the pages of the Great American Songbook with familiar standards made anew and enigmatic through the emotively ethereal, connective, almost otherworldly and with a real sense of depth and something approaching the tactile – especially instrument wise.

Under that same ‘umbrella title’ the second volume travels further back in time to the America Civil War period of rousing, rallying, sorrow, tragedy and hope sheet music; much of the material used to bolster a flagging campaign by the Union during the early and mid-years of that horrifying, destructive and divisive war – arguably never really settled, with suspicion still between the North and South of the country culturally, politically and economically. In fact, recalling songs from nigh on 160 years ago has never seemed more prescient; chiming true with the age we find ourselves in right now. A balance is struck, history revisited, propaganda resized, and the sentimental repurposed.  But arguably, the emphasis in this case is on the music of the eventual winners in this five-year conflict; although a number of the songs and rallying calls for the Union were also adopted and adapted by the Confederacy after they’d seen the effect it had on boosting morale and symbolising the cause.

Once more in an intimate setting with just the accompaniment of Erez Dessel on piano, Tyler Wagner on double-bass, and Maria on guitar, the Civil War period is amorphously twisted into minimalist meanders and dreamily untethered shapes of the tactile, the avant-garde, and descriptive. At the heart of it all, Maria’s voice is relaxed and diaphanous; pitched somewhere between folk, the Celtic, the traditional and the jazzy. The tragically played out ‘Booth Killed Lincoln’ sounds a little like Joan Baez in parts. It certainly, in all its traditionalist lament, has an air of Dylan about it and the Laurel Canyon circle of female troubadours. Like a play in itself, the acts, steps that lead to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on that fateful day, at that fateful performance at the Ford Theatre, Washington D.C., could be lifted off the sensational pages of that time’s broadsheets. Lincoln’s last breath, rather ironically to the last, is very much Dylan: “Of all the actors in this town, I loved John Wilkes Booth the best.” Musically, there’s but an essence of accompaniment, with the double-bass strings sounding more like a wooden set of spokes and a sort of dampened drum. The odd harmonic is twinged.

However, the album strikes a jarring chord of dissonance, a heavily pressed and free form piano opening gambit of Keith Jarrett and Thomas Schultz. Interpreting the American composer of romance and patriotism George Frederick Root’s most popular rallying call, ‘Battle Cry Of Freedom’, Maria seems to counterbalance Dessel’s passing storms, shades of forbode, salon bar upright tones, uncertainty, the abstract and discordant with disconsolate beauty. A second Root interpretation, the succour giving ‘Tramp Tramp Tramp’ (aka ‘The Prisoner’s Hope’, written in the later stages of the war) is sympathetic to the original, but more melodiously jazzy.

Some of the material leans towards country: albeit a version that exists in a fog of the Appalachians and Woodstock. There’s even a moment on ‘Abraham’s Daughter’ where either the double-bass or guitar resembles a banjo. And the album’s most unusual break from the formula (though to use that word is doing Maria and her foils a disservice), the finale ‘My Old Horse Died’, features a far more rustic, loosely and buzzier more carelessly strummed guitar and the sound of what could be some kind of replicated plucking/picking tines. I do love this song; it sounds like Dylan writing a filmic Western song to feature in Little Big Man or McCabe & Mrs. Miller. As far as I can hear, there isn’t much in the way of horses, but some ironic metaphor for loss, wistful financial and property woes: “Swallowed the place where my home stood. Mortgage guy came round, claimed the hole in the ground where my home once stood.” It almost sounds drunken this slice of Western music from the counterculture.

Remembrance, tragedy, the call to arms, and above all, the encouraging original lyrics of the abolitionist (one of the key themes, subjects of many of these songs) ring like wispy or beautified and pining poetry from the battle fields of America. Only, that same divisive rage, the splits, the distrustfulness and hunger for independence rages still to this day; a constant cry wolf of civil war is voiced whenever the political class weaponizes its losses, or failure to win an election. Handled with subtly, and a classy skill that stretches out the meaning, the lyricism, the mood and intention further, a new spotlight has been drawn upon these historical songs; taken into an avant-garde territory without losing sight of a melody, a form or shape, Maria and her foils create a rather unique and incredible atmosphere; bringing dusted off Civil War pamphlets, sheet music and the like to a new audience. Every bit as encapsulating and dreamy as Volume I. It will be interesting to see what Volume III offers, and where Maria goes next. An excellent, spellbinding series so far.    

Saul Williams, Carlos Niño & Friends ‘Saul Williams meets Carlos Niño & Friends at TreePeople’ (International Anthem) 28^th August 2025

An enviable collaborative union of talent from both the East and West coasts of an America on the eve (or thereabouts) of Trump’s inauguration, under the TreePeople canopy of righteous indignation at the state of a nation, gathered the totemic voiced poetic polymath Saul Williams, the divine styler, multi-instrumentalist, percussionist and producer of afflatus and new age conscious jazz and its many strands, Carlos Niño, and a host of congruous musical friends from a scene of ever-expanding inter-connections. You can’t get any more symbolic than this; setting up for an experimental – perhaps extemporized in part – performance beneath the black oak and walnut trees in Coldwater Canyon Park, L.A. Recorded at the time and now seeing the light (so to speak) eight months later into the new Presidency, this ensemble piece’s headlined foils and longtime friends since the 1990s, combine forces across an archaeological dig of free associations. 

But before peeling back the layers of this psychogeography, a little about the artists involved in this part explorative, part free expressive, part oratory and part theatre. Not that Niño would boast, but the highly prolific producer, ‘expansive percussionist’, experimental composer, connector and communicator, has made albums as and with such notable luminaries as Ammoncontact, Build An Ark, The Life Force Trio, and others. And also overseen the Alice Coltrane protégé – the keyboardist, composer and actor – Surya Botofasina’s2022 devotional Everyone’s Children. All the while, leading or instigating his own loose ensemble of multidisciplinary artists and the & Friends banner. This time around, those friends include recurring foil Nate Mercereau (the solo artist in his own right’s skills include the guitar, composing, songwriting, live sampling and improvising), Aaron Shaw (the horn player has worked with such notable icons and names as Elijah Blake, Anderson Paak., Dave Chappelle, Herbie Hancock, and made music for TV and film), Andres Renteria (the L.A. percussionist/drummer and DJ has worked with an impressive host of artists over the year: Jose Gonzalez, Father John Misty, Flying Lotus and Nick Waterhouse), Maria The Artiste (hot-housed in the AACM of Chicago, the woodwind player, vocalist, vibraphonist, bandleader and composer is also a member of the late Horace Tapscott initiated, and now six decade running, Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra), Francesca Heart (the partial alias of Italian artist, researcher and electronic artist with a skill at playing the conch shell Francesca Mariano, who makes new age music of a kind on computers), Kamasi Washington (the saxophonist who’s profile has possibly been highest over the last twenty years, after ushering in a revival of a sort on spiritual, odyssey jazz, has picked up a number of awards and plaudits for his work and collaborations) and Aja Monet (the lauded and awarded contemporary poet, writer, lyricist and activist can be heard joining Williams with a forewarned and haunting poetic vision on ‘The Water is Rising/as we surpass the firing squad’).

Needing no introduction, but getting one anyway, American rapper, singer, songwriter, musician, poet, writer, and actor Saul Stacy Williams first came to attention during the late 1980s on the New York café poetry scene. The burgeoning innovator, mixing beat/poetics/slam and hip-hop, soon stood out. A big break came as the lead in the awarding winning Marc Levin directed movie SLAM in the 90s; the phenomenon of slam poetry, its reach via competitive performance outside academia, set free from the stiff studied branches of the elite institutions. The list of peers that Williams has performed with is incredible; from blast master KRS-One to illmatic Nas, The Fugees, beat poet Allen Ginsberg and Black arts movement luminary Sonia Sanchez. Williams has also been a driving force behind the Brooklyn Afro-punk movement, written a libretto for Ted Hearne’s LA Philharmonic produced oratorio PLACE and two symphonies by the late Swiss composer, Thomas Kessler, based on two books of Saul’s poetry, Said the shotgun to the head and The Dead Emcee Scrolls. The scope and range are wide indeed, with both Williams film roles and a stint on Broadway as the lead in the first hip-hop musical, Holler If You Hear Me – based upon the lyrics of Tupac Shakur – to consider. And on top of that a sextet of studio albums and quartet of poetry books, all translated into multiple languages. The self-titled album debut of which was produced by Rick Rubin. There’s so much more of course; a whole Wikipedia page in fact to delve into.

But what’s important is that the experience, creative richness and innovativeness of all participants in this movement of change is in no doubt. And when all brought together like this, the results have a real depth and breadth, weaving together so many connective threads of outrage and riled injustice and indignation. This is meta, an alternative, sometimes more felt than real, history toiled over until exposing the roots.

To distil this performance down to jazz would be an injustice in itself, as the ensemble and their two leads accentuate, ring and punctuate, and, without rhythm in most cases, build a spiritual, conscious and traumatic atmosphere around and bedded beneath the either peppered, prophesied, near uninterrupted flow of racial injury, of hurt, of rage and recourse. The musical and sound elements certainly recall some of the signatures of jazz; of artists such as Coleman, the Pharoah, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, of Don Cherry, The John Betsch Society, of Brother Ah and Idris Ackamoor. But nothing quite frames this performance, demarcated into four parts with an after show of appreciation and emotional final word sit-down with the audience. For amongst the collage of the atavistic and primal, as prehistoric beasts lift their heads disturbed by the stirring hands of the dig, and Edan’s wildlife emerges from the grasslands, and the sax sings a parched reedy song, the percussion mirrors the sounds of dry bones and beads, and the vibraphone’s bulb-like notes float like particles in the style of Jamal, Williams delivers omens and a associative thread of technological, economic, political, social ills. Williams sounds one part Quelle Chris, another part Amiri Baraka on that opening “land map”: that cradle of uncivilised repeal. Later on, as the poetics seem to be less interrupted or stretched, the style is more Watts Prophets; especially on ‘We are calling out in this moment’, which links together the origins of Manhattan and its stock exchange with the original Lenape peoples that once farmed it, cultivated it and called it home before the arrival of the Dutch and then the English. Origin stories connect with the occupy movement, Black Lives Matter in a flurry of redress; the financial epicentres slave trading roots almost matter-of-factly and shockingly mapped out.

Later on, Williams is joined by Aja Monet for the new age balm turn African wilderness haunting ‘‘The Water is Rising/as we surpass the firing squad’, who’s contribution amongst the vibraphone tinkles and dreamy serenaded saxophone wafts and lingers and pines, and the “insect gossip”, recalls Tenesha The Wordsmith passing the mic to the Last Poets, once Williams takes up his post in front of the said allegorical “firing squad”. 

Sitting down with the audience at the very end of this astonishing performance – bordering on both the theatre, the counterculture, and the activist -, and after the stats, the re-purposed jargon, the rebalance of history as it was and is, a time of emotional pleading and reminder that there is still work to be done. But that message is one of community and the need to build and maintain networks of support in the tough times; not to wallow or give in. But as one stage in the fight this album marks a new enterprise and platform for greater harmony and a safe place for experimentation. International Anthem can do no wrong, as they continue to facilitate such creative sparks of inventive free play and poetry.

___/The Monolith Cocktail Social Playlist Vol. 100___

For the 100^th time, the Social Playlist is an accumulation of music I love and want to share; with tracks from my various DJ sets and residencies over the years and both selected cuts from those artists and luminaries we’ve lost on the way and from those albums celebrating anniversaries each month.

Running for nearly 12 years now, Volume 100 is the latest eclectic and generational spanning playlist come radio show from me – the perfect radio show in fact: devoid of chatter, interruptions and inane self-promotion.

Here’s to the hundredth edition, which features a homage or two to Terry Reid and Howie Tee, who we both lost recently. Self-coining his own nickname, Reid’s voice was lionised as “superlungs” for his incredible vocal prowess. But as an all-round package, voice, guitarist and rock artist of universal repute – in any article or description, Reid is anointed as the ‘artists’ artist’ -, Reid could shake the foundations of blue-eyed soul and maximum R&B, blues rock and heavy rock. His name was touted around the 1960s, courted to front or join countless luminaries, from Led Zep and Deep Purple (he turned them both down). There’s many eclectic steps on the way, including a penchant for the Latin rhythms of Brazil (falling into his orbit during 1969, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, recently exiled by the military dictatorship of Brazil, were helped by Reid’s attorney to come to London; they would go on to flank Reid at the seminal Isle of Wight Pop Festival almost a year later in 1970), a direction into introspective jazz, desert mountain commune living and session work for Don Henley, Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt – this came after Reid more or less decided to retire from his solo career. A rich life lived. So, in my selection I’ve gone for a smattering spread of tracks from the cannon, starting back at the beginning with the title track from the 1968 LP bang bang you’re Terry Reid plus ‘The Hand Don’t Fit The Glove’, ‘Rich Kid Blues’, ‘Live Life’ and ‘Ooh Baby (Make Me Feel So Young)’.

From a whole other sphere of the musical landscape, Howie Tee, the hip-hop and new jack swing hit maker of repute during the 80s and 90s. Born in the UK, but raised up in Flat Bush, Brooklyn, Tee’s (or the name his folks would recognise, Howard Anthony Thompson) musical protectory took flight with a break in the early electro crew CDIII. Already familiarising himself with the mixing desk and production tools, Tee quickly jumped ship to producing, his first success being in conjunction with U.T.F.O.’s Kangol Kid, with the commercially hot hip-hop group Whistle. At the same time Tee also put together the equally successful Real Roxanne collaboration, scoring with ‘Bang Zoom (Let’s Go-Go)’ – which as the name suggests, rides on the go-go phenomenon. There would also be production credits for records by Cash Crew, Seeborn & Puma, E.S.P. and Izzy Ice. Tee then became the in-house producer for the New Jersey-based independent label Select Records, producing relative hits for Special Ed and Chubb Rock. But it wasn’t all hip-hop orientated, for in 1991 he mixed and co-produced Color Me Badd’s ‘I Wanna Sex You Up’: a Billboard number one. And he also made remixes for such diverse acts as Madonna and Maxi Priest. I’ve chosen both Special Ed and the Real Roxanne, plus Chubb’s bromance cut, ‘DJ Innovator’.

In a celebratory mood, I’ve also kept up the monthly inclusion of anniversary album tracks, with 60^th nods to The Beatles Help, Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited (I’ve gone for, what I hope, is two not so common of known cover versions from both) and Miles Davis E.S.P. There’s also 50^th glass raisers to Cortex’s cult favourite, Troupeau Bleu, Don Cherry’s pioneering Brown Rice, and Eno’s Another Green World.

Every month I like to collect up some of the more newish or recent tracks that didn’t make the Monthly playlist selection – either for lack of space or I just forgot to include at the time. In that category there’s Elaine Howley’s diaphanous, translucent ‘Hold Me In A New Way’, Mike Cooper’s vague South Seas, Pacific exotic mirage ‘Eternal Equinox’, U.S. Girls’ Jane (Doe) Country and Plastic Ono Band funk ‘No Fruit’, the collaborative PAUER/Wolfgang Perez/Der Wandler/Magic Island union’s yearning ‘Falling Over You’, and Pons hi-energy 80s work-it no wave dance diatribe ‘Fast Money Music’. There’s also a track from the recently released, and featured, Woody at Home Vols 1 and 2 – Guthrie hanging round like Banquo’s ghost over Dylan, who’s Highway is revisited this month.

The rest of the playlist is made up of cross-generational from across the ages by Jaz-O, Baby Washington, Isan Slete, Vincent Over The Sink, Phantom Payn Days, Lynn Castle, Mad Walls, Massacre and more…

TRACK LISTING:

The Real Roxanne FT. Howie Tee ‘Bang Zoom (Let’s Go-Go)’
Pons ‘Fast Money Music’
Themselves ‘Roman is as Roman Does’
Waylon Jennings ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ Mariangela Celeste & Vangelis ‘Honolulu Baby’
Woody Guthrie ‘One Little Thing An Atom Can’t Do’
Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons ‘Queen Jane Approximately’
Terry Reid ‘The Hand Don’t Fit The Glove’
Baby Washington ‘The Ballad Of Bobby Dawn’
Terry Reid ‘Rich Kid Blues’
U.S. Girls ‘No Fruit’
Lynn Castle ‘You Are the One’
John Baldry ‘It Ain’t Easy’
Isan Slete ‘Lam Phloen’
Terry Reid ‘Bang, Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)’
Miles Davis ‘R.J.’
Jaz-O ‘Put The Squeeze On ‘Em’
Special Ed ‘I Got It Made’
Cortex ‘Automne – Colchiques’
Brian Eno ‘Sky Saw’
Furniture ‘My Own Devices’
Mad Walls ‘Lily’
Massacre ‘Bones’
Terry Reid ‘Live Life’
Mint Tattoo ‘Wrong Way Girl’
Terry Reid ‘Ooh Baby (Make Me Feel So Young)’
Chubb Rock Ft. Howie Tee ‘DJ Innovator’
Don Cherry ‘Degi-Degi’
Elaine Howley ‘Hold Me In A New Way’
Mike Cooper ‘ETERNAL EQUINOX’
Xul Solar ‘Sigh’
Vincent Over the Sink ‘Number Theory’
Phantom Payn Days ‘primitive chamber music phone call blues’
Woody Guthrie ‘I’m A Child Ta Fight’
Willis Earl Beal ‘Like A Box’
Marcos Resende & Index ‘Nina Nenem’

___/Archives___

From the exhaustive Archives each month, a piece that’s either worth re-sharing in my estimates, or a piece that is either current or tied into one of our anniversary-celebrating albums. From the former category, my original review of Willis Earl Beal’s nite flights soul harrowed and ached Noctunes album, released a decade ago this month.

Willis Earl Beal ‘Noctunes’  
(Tender Loving Empire) Released 28th August 2015

Whether stretched beyond the realms of fact and fiction or not, the many travails of Willis Earl Beal fit the outsider artist profile perfectly. With more deaths/rebirths than the Dali Lama’s had reincarnations, Beal’s self-made and put-upon myth status as the Zorro masked articulate esoteric blues and soul poet, only reinforces the mystery that surrounds him. Hardly the result of an easy life – one that’s seen him grow up in a sort of odd isolation, plagued by both physical and mental health; a consequence in no small part of his injuries sustained when trying out for the army.

His musical epiphany arrived whilst down-and-out in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The untrained, and at one time homeless, but naturally gifted songwriter recorded the rawest of lo fi tracks, leaving them with his hand drawn cover art at various coffee shops around town, alongside flyers seeking a girlfriend with his phone number written on them. These unassuming offerings eventually made their way onto the cover of Found Magazine in America and from there, fell into the hands of XL Recordings Jamie-James Medina. Originally signing to the labels Bronx-based offshoot Hot Charity, releasing two well-received albums – his debut Acousmatic Sorcery in 2012 and Nobody Knows follow up in 2013 – Beal succumbed to either ennui, despondency or the pressures of suddenly being foisted into the music business and quit. Beal slopped off into a self-imposed exile in the backwoods of Olympia, Washington, and became the Noctunes crooner.

As the title suggests – a riff on nocturnes – these twelve nocturnal lullabies, paeans and plaintive ballads evoke the romantic nighttime meditations. Stripped to the barest of accompaniments, yearningly swooning with the occasional burst of a drawn-out primal scream, high notes and pained wallowing, Beal creates a haunted soundtrack. Part southern river ambient journey, part soul-baring soliloquy.

Once again dodging definition, he takes the mournful strings and suffused hymn like aspects of his previous recordings and ditches the bounce and R&B elements for minimalism. Still channelling Otis Redding with a side order of Bill Withers and echoing traces of TV On The Radio’s most dilatory maladies, Noctunes is, when prescribed in small doses, a visceral stirring experience. Choosing to say more with a lot less, lyrics, which if uttered by many other artists would sound like mere platitudes, are given a gut-wrenching and despondent leverage when leaving Beal’s lips.

Often draining, and at times laying it on a bit too thick, the album’s impact can be enervated when digested in one session. Lingering manifestations rather than epiphanies, it feels like our protagonist is unburdening his heart. A tough call on paper, yet the bare faint undertones of funeral parlour organ, stuttering jazz style drums, murmuring hums and synths lift the songs gently above morose and indulgence.

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